To Sell a Good Experience, You Have to Create One In-House First, with Bradley Rencher, the CEO of BambooHR
How can employers better take care of employees — and by extension improve the bottom line? What values, practices, and technologies can help organizations create an environment where employees thrive?
The U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that people quitting their jobs rose to 4.3 million in August 2021. Professor Anthony Klotz coined the term for this mass exodus, the “Great Resignation
On the surface, it’s not good for business nor is it good for people. We’re way past the canary in the coal mine. If a three-alarm fire is bad, how bad is a 4.3 million alarm fire? What about a fire alarm with millions more?
Certainly, the pandemic has had its effect in the Great Resignation, but to say that workers are leaving their jobs only because of that one factor is a huge oversimplification and a poor excuse. The reality is that, for way too long, companies have searched for all the ways they can make more money and have ignored their most precious asset in doing so — their employees.
Bradley Rencher, the Chief Executive Officer of BambooHR, believes that employees have been left out of the business conversation for far too long. BambooHR is a HR company that builds software products to help businesses create positive experiences for their employees.
“We’ve been talking about customer experience, we’ve been talking about Cloud, we’ve been talking, maybe about security and privacy,” Rencher said. “That’s really been the topic that has dominated the world. Where’s the employee been in that narrative and conversation for the last 15 years? It’s taken the pandemic and the great resignation for us to get slapped in the face as business leaders to say, Hey, there’s a part of this conversation that you’re not having. And it’s the experience your employees are having with your brand.”
Bamboo HR supports more than 20,000 businesses and has millions of users all over the world, but to reach this success, BambooHR first had to learn how to take care of its own employees. To ensure that was happening, Rencher asked his employees what they loved about BambooHR?
“I got 500 emails not saying, ‘Oh, I love the ping-pong table,’ or, ‘I love that I get free food,’ or ‘my standing desk,’” Rencher said. “It was none of that — none of the little things that we spend so much time obsessing over. What mattered was the values.”
But how do you stick to your core values if your organization grows from 10 to 10,000 people?
“If you don’t actually have a roadmap, you don’t actually know what it is that we’re building in the product, guess what you’re going to end up with,” Rencher said. “You’re going to end up with basically a Franken-stack product that no one can really use and build. Same thing with your culture. If you don’t have a roadmap for what it is that you’re looking to accomplish in your culture, as you grow your business, you’re going to end up with a culture that feels really inconsistent to employee 1,001 and 10,001. We think about culture almost as a product.”
It’s really sad that a pandemic finally forced many companies to stop looking past their employees to some golden horizon. They didn’t see that what truly mattered most was right in front of them because a company’s most valuable relationship is the one it has with its employees.
For BambooHR, it didn’t take drastic global events to see the light. BambooHR has been certified as a Great Place to Work six years in a row. To hear why it’s been able to see what few others have, tune into Business X factors.
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